Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' written in Emacs Org Mode
tendollaradventure.comI authored and developed an interactive children's book about entrepreneurship and money management. The journey started with Twinery, the open-source tool for making interactive fiction, discovered right here on HN. The tool kindled memories of reading CYOA style books when I was a kid, and I thought the format would be awesome for writing a story my kids could follow along, incorporating play money to learn about transactions as they occurred in the story.
Twinery is a fantastic tool, and I used it to layout the story map. I really wanted to write the content of the story in Emacs and Org Mode however. Thankfully, Twinery provided the ability to write custom Story Formats that defined how a story was exported. I wrote a Story Format called Twiorg that would export the Twinery file to an Org file and then a Org export backend (ox-twee) to do the reverse. With these tools, I could go back and forth between Emacs and Twinery for authoring the story.
The project snowballed and I ended up with the book in digital and physical book formats. The Web Book is created using another Org export backend.
Ten Dollar Adventure: https://tendollaradventure.com
Sample the Web Book (one complete storyline/adventure): https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/
I couldn't muster the effort to write a special org export backend for the physical books unfortunately and used a commercial editor to format these.
Twiorg: https://github.com/danishec/twiorg
ox-twee: https://github.com/danishec/ox-twee
Previous HN post on writing the transaction logic using an LLM in Emacs: https://blog.tendollaradventure.com/automating-story-logic-w...
Twinery 2: <https://twinery.org/> and discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32788965
Do NOT ever use that 4 word description of the genre nor the well know 4 letter acronym. Trademark owner goes VERY AGGRESSIVELY after both. Erase every mention of it everywhere, delete repo and create new one. Replace it with something like
- Interactive Story - Branching Narrative - Pick Your Path - Create Your Own Quest - Personalized Plotline - Dynamic Storytelling
Stop whatever you are doing and do it NOW!
I no longer do game dev but I'm already sweating.
Ouch.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21720533/netflix-banders...
Interesting project!
When I looked into CYOA, I opted for Ink. It's using a nice text-based language, a bit like markdown. It worked well for me, and I think it's a good option if you want to use a text editor.
I wrote about my experiments here: https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/my-adventures-with-narrative...
I'm close to finishing a commercial interactive story with choices using Ink: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
Ink looks iteresting! Twinery provides a nice visual editor for the passages and branches which I found appealing. Ultimately, I used Mermaid to create visual snapshots of the story which were useful when editing the physical book.
Theoretically, epub format is ideal for a cyoa format book. Each choice at the end of the page can be a hyperlink to the next (internal) file, and the pages/files themselves could be marked non-linear (so that someone can't just page through to see all the pages).
Unfortunately, Apple and the others who have authored epub clients do not implement it correctly and behave as if non-linear pages are supposed to be some sort of footnote, and pop up models to display them, rather than just treating them as the reflowable content that they should be. Not marking them as non-linear is also problematic, because something about it seems off when you can just scrub through pages in linear order. It's unlikely to ever be fixed either, so the format itself is ruined for this purpose.
It's a shame that Apple didn't get non-linear epubs right, considering they're the ones who made HyperCard!
I've been tinkering on and off with a javascript hack that I hope would prevent swiping through files/chapters, but I could never get it to work right. There's not alot of documentation even saying what javascript is permitted in epub... there are a few of the Jackson Fighting Fantasy books that I'd like to convert and keep the hit points and dice rolls entirely within epub (I think CYOA had this as well with a "flip a coin and if it's heads turn to page X").
Oh well.
Neat! IF-wise, there's also
M-x dunnet
which has shipped with GNU Emacs since 1994.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunnet_(video_game)
This is awesome! Thank you for sharing the backstory, and open-sourcing the tools you built. THIS is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to HN more often than I should.
Thank you! I have been an Emacs user/consumer for many years. This project finally got me into the proverbial weeds, a fun venture, learning elisp, exploring the Org code base especially around the export backends [1]. It was useful going through the one.el source code as well, and I now write my blog in Emacs, rendering it using this package [2].
[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/org/o... [2] https://github.com/tonyaldon/one.el
I'm torn on the use of AI generated images. I want to like them but they are distracting...
Anyway, nice work!
I know not everyone has this distaste for it, but as soon as I hit the landing it was so obviously AI-generated that I had to close it.
Sadly, enough people will fall & pay for it
Sorry to hijack a bit the thread. I have been using Emacs for the past 20+ years. Before I could live in Emacs, now, I find it harder (software forced on me by external customers, AI tools, ...).
I try everywhere I can to install an Emacs mode for code/text navigation. But they tend to be inconsistent and for some software, it is simply not possible.
Do you have good resources to help there (running Linux/Gnome)? Do you keep the faith or switched "out"?
Install the latest emacs release and you will be able to do `M-x eglot` – this by default knows about language servers for many programming languages, so if you e.g. do this while in a C++ file in some project, it will start clang or ccls (whatever's in PATH); the language server will then be active for all files in that project and you can use `M-.` (xref-find-definitions), `M-,` (xref-go-back), `M-?` (xref-find-references). Try also `M-x eglot-code-actions` on a symbol to see all available actions (renaming, add imports, refactoring etc.; what you get here depends on the language server).
I also use this plugin https://github.com/minad/consult which has the command `consult-ripgrep`, very useful for e.g. looking up all occurrences of the symbol at point (and text navigation across multiple files).
For "AI", start with https://github.com/karthink/gptel/ (its README lists alternative packages, as you can see there is no lack of llm support in emacs, both chat, "agents" and more specific use-cases)
To add to this, consult works great with embark, and orderless, which make for a wonderful emacs experience.
Also, on the llm point even though I know elisp, and use emacs heavily, they can be great for creating little personal commands that just make things a little nicer to use (lowering the barrier of "I'll write a command for this" from 15 minutes to 2 minutes is huge and means I can be bothered to do it for more marginal things which makes the editor even more pleasant to use).
I didn't know about M-? ... I like how if there's only 1 match it automatically jumps to that single reference. :)
Regarding AI, I don't have a replacement, but for code/text navigation, eglot is a good option.
I think that the AI CLI agents are the response for AI, but for now, I am opening VSCode with an Emacs extension and some keybinding changes.
I thought this was going to be a game engine written in Emacs Lisp :) but this is still cool. Congrats!
Bug report for https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/
Daphne's eyes are brown, except in the supermarket scene, where they're grey.
How were the images produced?
Thanks! The story images were made in Google Whisk. The tool allows you to generate a character and then apply the character to a scene separately defined. While more advanced than other image generation platforms, it isn't perfect and the images required lots of editing in GIMP. The vectors (achievement stickers, play cash) were made in Inkscape.
Were the illustrations generated with Twinery? How do you guarantee consistency of the generated characters across multiple drawings?
Ai slop for art, people really need to stop buying these products. Atleast publicize or disclosed you used ai for the art.